A Fuzzy Approach to Sequential Failure Analysis Using Petri nets

In highly competitive industrial market, the concept of failure analysis is an unavoidable fact in complex industrial systems. Reliability of such systems not only depends on the reliability of each element of these systems, but also depends on occurrence of sequence of failures. In this paper, a novel approach to sequential failure analysis is proposed which is based upon fuzzy logic and the concept of Petri nets which is utilized to track all the risky behaviors of the system and to determine the potential failure sequences and then prioritizing them in order to perform corrective actions. The process of prioritizing failure sequences in this paper is done by a novel similarity measure between generalized fuzzy numbers. The proposed methodology is demonstrated with an example of two automated machine tools and two input/output buffer stocks.